Welcome to the eight post in the ramblingly random R rants series, or R⁴ for short. We took a short break over the last few weeks due to some conferencing followed by some vacationing and general chill.

But we’re back now, and this post gets us back to initial spirit of (hopefully) quick and useful posts. Perusing yesterday’s batch of CRANberries posts, I noticed a peculiar new directory shown the in the diffstat output we use to compare two subsequent source tarballs. It was entitled .aspell/, in the top-level directory, and in two new packages by R Core member Kurt Hornik himself.

The context is, of course, the not infrequently-expressed desire to customize the spell checking done on CRAN incoming packages, see e.g. this r-package-devel thread.

And now we can as I verified with (the upcoming next release of) RcppArmadillo, along with a recent-enough (i.e. last few days) version of r-devel. Just copying what Kurt did, i.e. adding a file .aspell/defaults.R, and in it pointing to rds file (named as the package) containing a character vector with words added to the spell checker’s universe is all it takes. For my package, see here for the peculiars.

Or see here:

edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$ cat defaults.R 
Rd_files <- vignettes <- R_files <- description <-
    list(encoding = "UTF-8",
         language = "en",
         dictionaries = c("en_stats", "RcppArmadillo"))
edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$ r -p -e 'readRDS("RcppArmadillo.rds")'
[1] "MPL"            "Sanderson"      "Templated"
[4] "decompositions" "onwards"        "templated"
edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$     

And now R(-devel) CMD check --as-cran ... is silent about spelling. Yay!

But take this with a grain of salt as this does not yet seem to be "announced" as e.g. yesterday's change in the CRAN Policy did not mention it. So things may well change -- but hey, it worked for me.

And this all is about aspell, here is something topical about a spell to close the post:

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.